Balloon Museum Opens Its New York Flagship. DAYDREAM Opens August 7 at the Tin Building
DAYDREAM. After captivating more than seven million visitors across Europe, North America, and Asia, Balloon Museum announces its most significant evolution yet: a permanent flagship location in New York City, opening on Friday, August 7 at the historic Tin Building in the Seaport District of Lower Manhattan.
The inaugural exhibition, DAYDREAM, AIR BECOMES ART, takes its name from that moment when, in the midst of ordinary daily life, we drift away from the everyday and slip into a dreamlike reality, head in the clouds, eyes elsewhere. This is not a dream in the sense of something ideal or out of reach, but a world you genuinely step into and experience for yourself: a dreamlike encounter that does not imitate the unreal, but instead makes reality denser and more vivid. Featuring acclaimed and award-winning names, the exhibition offers a concept-driven sensory journey in which the familiar gives way to the surreal. These installations invite the discovery of new perspectives and active engagement, triggering a radical emotional activation in which air itself becomes art. DAYDREAM is more than an exhibition. It is a new way of experiencing art, where space becomes an environment and the audience becomes part of the work.
What is inflatable art?
At the heart of DAYDREAM lies a simple yet powerful idea: air as an artistic medium. Inflatable art brings together form, space, and imagination, using air to give life to monumental structures and to invite interaction. These works challenge traditional definitions of sculpture and space by embracing lightness, scale, and accessibility.
The result? Gigantic, surreal environments where visitors can get lost, both physically and emotionally. DAYDREAM invites audiences to explore air as both a physical force and a metaphor for emotion, transformation, and connection. The exhibition is designed to be highly interactive and engaging: no silent rooms or barriers, but artworks to touch, walk through, listen to, and photograph. From young children to art enthusiasts, every visitor can find their own path through the installations, making each experience personal and unique.
The exhibition is not only for the art world, but also a destination loved by families, schools, and curious visitors of all ages. Children can run through inflatable forests, explore luminous domes, and learn through play and movement, while adults encounter moments of nostalgia, wonder, and reflection.
Some featured installations
Marina Abramović. Snowy / Windy / Spring on PlanetZ.
A world built from childhood imagination. Marina Abramović is one of the most influential artists of our time, pioneering performance art since the early 1970s. For DAYDREAM, she presents her first-ever work in inflatable sculpture, a major new installation that marks a new direction in her practice. “As a child, I imagined a place far beyond our own sky. A planet with its own weather, its own atmosphere, its own logic entirely. It was my own version of science fiction. How did it feel on this planet? Was it snowy, windy, or could you sense the first green breath of spring? I called it Planet Z.” Snowy / Windy / Spring on PlanetZ is a direct transmission from that childhood imagination. A monumental inflatable landscape, lush, coiling, intensely alive, with a white path threading through its center. Visitors walk its surface and become the first inhabitants of a planet that existed, until now, only in the mind of one person. The balloon, Abramović writes, is fundamentally a childhood object, one of the first forms we encounter that can be filled with breath, that can float, that can disappear. In this way, it is very close to performance itself: it exists completely in the present tense, and then it is gone. “This newest work, whether you deem it sculpture, installation, or performance, is simply a reconnection to the awe we all experience in our childhoods. I hope it allows visitors to reconnect and discover what is possible when imagination is given space to take hold.” (Marina Abramović)
Boris Acket. The Birth of a Thousand Voices.
Between myth, machine, and the music of belief. In the Armenian tradition, the Bird of a Thousand Voices holds its power in song. To find it, the path of no return must be taken, through black, white, and red worlds, hunted by betrayal and forty-headed demons. Acket’s twelve-meter transmedia sculpture draws on this myth and on Da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines to ask the oldest question: what does it cost to believe in the impossible? Built from custom mechanisms, fabric, and tungsten light, the work moves between the natural and the artificial, between the pure sound of instruments and the distortion of synthesizers, never resolving the tension between the two.
The Tin Building.
At the edge of the East River in Lower Manhattan’s Seaport District, near the Brooklyn Bridge, the Tin Building by Jean-Georges stands as one of downtown New York’s most storied and actively transforming landmarks. Built in 1907 as the heart of the historic Fulton Fish Market, it is now emerging as a premier global destination for contemporary art, culture, and design. The addition of Balloon Museum signals a major expansion of the Seaport’s creative footprint, positioning the neighborhood as a year-round hub for large-scale cultural programming and international contemporary art.
DAYDREAM is the first permanent exhibition by Balloon Museum.
